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I want to make my program work in other languages and accept input into the database from other lanaguages and perhaps in different alphabets. I am looking for some informaton/tutorial on this subject but have no idea where to start, some searches i tried revealed nothing. Any suggestions?

is there any problem with mysql and php with for example french special charcters (ones with accents)? do i have to change anything to put them in the database? how about using completly different character sets such as japanase?

bascially my plan is to seperate a lot of the navigation elelments from the site by using "langauge sets" that would be stored inside mysql - so i need to know if i am going to have any problems using these before i embrak on trying!

the reason i ask is that at gossamer-threads there is often talk of making the script work in other languages and changes to the code these people have to make, so i thought that might make a difference in php/mysql somewhere as well.

Sorry 7stud if this is a silly question for you but I am sure you don't know everything either.

I think it shouldn't be any problem.. I have never try this before... but it shouldn't be limited by the language system.

I mean Mysql is such a powerful system... from my experience with chinese language, usually if you cannot display the languages... you just need to do some setting in the meta tag and set the language set.. can liao

What you need here is "Unicode" support. Unicode is like the ultimate character set - ASCII (the standard language encoding that's been about for ages) stores characters as 8 bits (on or off elements) - that allows it to represent 256 characters. While this is enough for the standard english alphabet plus extra characters when you think about a language like chinese ASCII just doesn't cut it.

Unicode stores characters as 16 bits, and can thus be used to represent 65,535 characters. It can therefore be used to represent every character of every language ever created - and is probably what you need for your project.

Perl, Java and XML all have full support for XML - unfortunately as far as I can tell PHP doesn't. PHP does have functions to deal with XML though so it might be feasible to use XML for the data in your application and process it using PHP. I don't think mySQL supports Unicode either - however Oracle and MS SQL do. There's a full list of programming languages and databases that have unicode support here:

I did a search for Unicode on the mysql.com site, and the only reference to it I found was on the "TODO" page. It looks like it's a feature they want to add but haven't implemented yet. There are plenty of other databases that support Unicode though (some of them open source) - see the list on the Unicode site for details.

i will, i am still working out the best way to do what i want with words, should i just load one big array for them and where store them etc... once i have worked out how to do that i will try different languages and see what happens.